


A thousand teeth, yours among them, I know

by sarcasticbones



Category: His Dark Materials (TV), Supernatural, Supernatural RPF, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Cats, Daemon!Jensen, Dragon Jensen Ackles, Dragons, Inspired by The Witcher, Jensen turns into a man, M/M, Misha and Jensen have crazy magic chemistry, Witcher!Jared, Witchers Have Feelings (The Witcher), bard!Misha, cat！Jensen, do witchers have feelings?, dragon!Jensen, everybody has baggage, that's not how daemons work!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:28:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23733115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasticbones/pseuds/sarcasticbones
Summary: This is SPN RPF, but in Witcher AU and mashed up with some elements (the idea of daemons) from His Dark Materials.Jaredt of Rivia is the witcher, he has a daemon Jensen (or does he), the two of them seem to have picked up a bard they can't get rid of.
Relationships: Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles/Misha Collins
Comments: 22
Kudos: 20





	1. Don't touch

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aeriallon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeriallon/gifts), [cinderellasleftshoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinderellasleftshoe/gifts).



> Ok so ... I was talking to @cinderellasleftshoe about how it would be really nice to write some SPN fic (because of the pandemic, but also because season 15, and because that last photoshoot), but the pandemic kind of makes the idea of coming up with a storyline very difficult, and wouldn't it be nice to just write a bit. And then I was talking to @aeriallon about the same thing, and she said that she has a friend who calls writing just a scene or a ficlet a bijoux fic, and recommended I try that. A bjoux.  
> "How lovely!" I thought, and, naturally, came up with this whole epic magical set up.  
> I think I might like it, and if y'all like it (lemme know, comments are the best thing ever), I think I might want to keep writing it for a bit.

Someone throws … t h r o w s a bread knuckle at Misha’s head and another at his lute. It makes a loud, offended clang. The tavern echoes with the booing of the unwashed, uncultured travelers, who wouldn’t recognize an epic song if it slithered in through their ears and started laying eggs in their brains. Another piece of bread hits him right in the eye and Misha topples over with an indignant squawk. He contemplates running, but decides to gather up the bread just in case. For later. When one is as talented as Misha, yet as unappreciated, one does not simply leave bread on the floor. Even if said bread was just used in a projectile assault against one’s person. Especially in that case. All weaponized bread belongs to the victim. It's only fair.

He’s moving across the floor on his hands and knees, when he bumps into something. There’s a tip of a black leather boot, big leather clad knee, and a truly impressive leather clad thigh. Misha swallows, but averts his eyes. He has zero desire to experience said knee in his face. Lingering on even such an impressive a thigh would not be worth it. Slowly standing, he takes in the rest of the man. Long fingers wrapped around a pitcher of beer, strong forearms, broad shoulders, a muscled chest and a … witcher medallion.  
Misha hides an involuntary gasp of surprise, poorly, and takes a smalls step back. He’s not afraid, he rarely is … his mother told him he was dropped on the head one time too many as a child, but witchers. Everyone knows about witchers. Everyone’s heard songs. Witchers are not born, they are made. Wrought in the fires of pain, suffering and deprivation. Hammered into blunt, unfeeling instruments for killing monsters. Scored by discipline, potions and magic. Witchers are not nice. And this one … his medallion is a dragon. Misha has heard songs about this medallion, the Dragon of Rivia. This must be Jaredt. He is … not nice. 

But. It won’t hurt to look. He is already looking. Might as well get a glimpse of the man’s face. Maybe put it in a song.  
Misha takes another small step back and looks up. The witcher is not looking at him, but out of the small, grimy window. He has an angular jawline, covered in thick scruff, a triangular nose, and his shoulder length hair is – surprisingly – not all white. The songs lied. A whole section is shockingly silver, but the rest is chestnut. Human? But his eyes are … golden. There is no other way to describe them. The witcher has golden eyes. They don’t look like eyes of a murdering sociopath, they look warm, like sunlight. It’s probably the stupid golden eyes that make Misha open his stupid mouth and say: “I love the way you just sit in the corner and brood.”  
The witcher says nothing. He doesn’t look at Misha, which is, frankly, insulting.  
“I mean,” Misha says, because now he’s invested in having the witcher look at him: “no one else hesitated to comment on my performance.”  
Jaredt lifts his pitcher for a long swallow, and placing it back on the tabletop says, still not looking at Misha: “I’m here to drink alone.” His voice is low, gruff, exactly what one would imagine a witcher’s voice to be. Misha edges closer, lightly rests his hip against the table.  
“Good, good, but you must have some review for me. Three words or less.”  
The witcher lifts his pitcher for another long drink and stands. He is really much taller than Misha was prepared for, and when he finally, finally looks at him, that too is not what Misha expected. The golden eyes are not warm. They’re impenetrable. It’s eerie and inviting and fills Misha with ill premonitions and other, harder to define sensations. The gold is of dragonhide and treasure and ill fate. Misha’s body bends on its own accord to angle his torso as far away from the witcher as he can.  
“They don’t exist,” Jaredt says, tossing coin, grabbing his sword bag and moving past Misha.  
It takes watching his broad back recede for the spell of his precious metal eyes to break, and for Misha to follow suit, lured by the gleam.  
“What doesn’t exist?” he asks as both of them step outside, into the affirming sunlight.  
“The creatures in your song. Now go away.”  
Jaredt is untying his bay horse, petting its neck with a gentle hand. It must be that gentle hand - a trickster like the amber eyes before - that propels Misha into his next foolhardy sentence.  
“I would like to come with. I could help? Are you hunting a monster? Surely two extra hands would be of use.”  
Jaredt’s horse snorts a dismissal, and Jaredt, throwing a passing glance at Misha’s nice, clean, pale hands, mounts.  
“Okay, fair,” Misha says: “but, hear me out … you need new songs. Have you heard the ones hey sing now … Butcher of Blaviken, you have a bit of an image problem. I could relieve you of that. I could,” he reaches out for the reigns.  
“Don’t touch Roach,” Jardet says and starts his horse on a gentle trot.  
“I could write new songs of your adventure!” Misha yells after him. “All the North would be too busy singing the tales of Jaredt of Rivia, the heroic witcher!”  
Jaredt doesn’t stop.

*

Misha doesn’t expect their paths to cross. He’s on foot, the witcher is on horse and has expressed no need for his company. He definitely doesn’t expect Jaredt to feed him to a dragon, yet this is what is happening.  
A scream unlodges from somewhere deep inside Misha’s body, before he registers it even building. His head hurts and his hands come away sticky with blood when he brings them up to cover his face.  
But there’s a dragon.  
Dragons don’t exist, but in legend.  
There’s a dragon.  
There’s a dragon.  
A real-life, actual dragon.  
With gold talons and scales glinting harshly in the sun. With teeth, so many teeth.  
There is a scuffle and a horrible noise as Misha tries to run and Jaredt knocks him down. Misha’s head hurts even more. A dirty hand covers his mouth, but at least the crazy noise stops. 

There is a dragon.  
A dragon the size of a grove of pines.  
A dragon whose folded wings jerk dangerously.  
Death is silent, soft and black. 

*

The sky is a jarring red when Misha cracks his eyes again. There’s a bedroll under his head, he can hear and smell fire, and his skull aches profoundly. He closes his eyes against the pain and tries to think.  
He is not dead.  
Then he remembers the D R A G O N and his eyes fly open again, pain or no pain.  
But he can’t see one now. Did he imagine it? Did Jaredt spell him to lose his grip on reality? But witcher magic doesn’t conjure sights from thin air.  
“Here,” Jaredt says and passes a cup, watches Misha take it shakily, expresses his impatience with something between a grunt and a sigh and supports Misha so he can drink without spilling all over himself.  
“Dragon,” Misha says.  
“There is no dragon.”  
“Dragon,” Misha insists.  
Jaredt says nothing, but lets go of Misha, who sags back onto the bedroll.  
Time trickles by, Misha’s head feels marginally better as the red bleeds out of the sky, into the folds of the horizon, and stars blink, wearily at first, then more and more brightly with each passing breath.  
“The dragon tried to eat me,” Misha says when the sky has turned blue.  
Jaredt grunts. It’s not an affirmative grunt, rather an insulted one. Misha doesn’t know how he knows, but he knows.  
“A sylvan threw iron rocks at your head and tried to drag you off.”  
“A dragon.”  
“There is no dragon.”  
“A sylvan?”  
“Yes, a sylvan, your head was bleeding.”  
“You saved me?”  
Jaredt doesn’t even grunt.  
Misha must dose off for a bit, for when he notices the sky again, it is black, and he can see a faint glow of where the fire must be. There’s a quiet murmur of Jaredt’s words, too soft to make out, but so clearly at ease and friendly, and … plentiful that Misha thinks he is hallucinating again. Jaredt communicates in grunts and muscle ticks, he doesn’t … converse. And this is what he is doing now. He is having a conversation with someone. Misha strains his ears, but he can hear no other voice and still can’t make out the words in what Jaredt is saying. All the effort must make a noise though, or maybe Jaredt just knows, with his creepy witcher senses, that Misha is trying to listen in, because he stops talking. For a while they lie in silence under the enormity of the night sky. Misha’s head feels like he can attempt a look around. He gingerly pushes up on his elbows. Roach is tied to a tree in the distance. Jaredt is lying on the other side of the fire, arms crossed behind his back.  
“Thank you for saving me,” Misha says.  
Jaredt grunts.  
And that’s when Misha sees it. There, nestled in Jaredt’s armpit, a ginger-golden cat with lynx like tufts on the tips of its ears. It has green eyes, cutting like gems, which it now points at Misha. Two sharp emeralds of suspicion.  
“You have a cat,” Misha says dumbly.  
The cat flicks one of its ears. Jaredt says nothing. Not even a grunt.  
“Why do you have a cat?”  
The cat stands, bowing its back first then stretching, front legs long, claws – glinting gold in the dying light of the fire - spread out.  
“You were talking to the cat?”  
“This is Jensen,” the witcher finally says: “don’t touch him.”  
“You’re really weird about your animals, you know that?” Misha says: “don’t touch Roach, don’t touch Jensen. What kind of a cat name is Jensen anyway?”  
Silence settles again as Jaredt lets Misha’s questions float away, unanswered. Maybe he sleeps, maybe he suffers Misha’s company in stoic silence. The cat keeps vigil.  
Misha sits, knees bent, arms around them, resting his chin on his knee and stares at the cat. 

There is something. Something in its eyes. In the color of its fur, in its golden claws. It’s like … it makes Misha think of … his knocked-around brain refuses to cooperate, sticking like sludge, but there is something.  
Jaredt sighs, and turns on his side. With his back now towards the fire and Misha, he says: “Do not touch Jensen. Ever. He’s a daemon.”


	2. Did you not want adventures for your songs?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misha finds out a bit more about Jensen the daemon cat and it is ... weird. Against all odds, it seems that both Jaredt and Misha might be kind of nice. Sometimes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi my lovies. So I have decided to keep writing this. Goal is a chapter per week. I've been mapping the contours of the universe and the storyline a lot this week and I'm getting excited.   
> I hope you like it too. As always, lemme know, comments are better than candy.

Jaredt refused to answer any of Misha’s late-night questions about the daemon, and Misha is nothing but surprised to find the witcher still around in the morning. He sits, large and unmoving, where the campsite used to be, on a decaying log, wearing what Misha interprets as a sour expression. All of his belongings are gathered up. Roach is saddled. The air smells strongly of pine and the forest is quiet. It feels like a prelude.  
“I have to say, I expected you to be gone,” Misha says, rubbing his eyes, realizing he badly needs to wash his face. His head, thank gods, no longer hurts. He feels around for lumps and cuts with careful fingertips.  
“So did I.” Jaredt shoots an annoyed glance somewhere above Misha.   
The daemon cat is on one of the middle branches of the small pine Misha’s been sleeping under. It stares right back at Jaredt, flicking its tail, then looks down at Misha. It’s eyes are absurdly green. It’s eerie. It’s beautiful. Misha swallows. There it is, that feeling again, the one he thought was just a symptom of a concussion. Pulling pulling pulling at him, fingering him like a lute string, demanding he poke, prod, inquire, unearth, unravel, own, grasp, grab, consume.  
Misha shakes his head. Cat, it’s a cat. A cat.   
“Hi Jensen,” he says.  
The cat turns both of its ears forward, its eyes growing rounder and darker, and stops the angry thrashing of its tail. Its whiskers jerk. It stands – dancer balance, predator grace - and starts down the tree. Nails scrape bark, the sound crackling over Jaredt’s hum. Misha doesn’t know what to make of the hum. It’s not an angry hum. It might be an inquisitive one? He can’t look at Jaredt’s face, because he’s looking at the bloody cat. Magnetic cat. Magic cat. Daemon creature. Misha has never wanted to touch a beast so bad in his entire life.   
Just because he’s not allowed to?   
It feels more than that.   
Yes, he doesn’t like to be told what (not to) do, but. But. He slides his fingers under his own butt, sits on them. Better safe than sorry. He doesn’t want to know what the witcher would do if he touched his daemon. He would probably tear off his arms and beat him to death with them. As a boy he once saw a little girl almost scratch a grown man’s face off, because he had mistakenly grabbed her daemon. Other people’s daemons are not to be touched, ever. Not unless an express invitation has been issued, and those usually mean a special relationship. Everybody knows that. All Misha’s been expressly invited to do is to abstain to from touching Jensen. But … but… But nothing. Who knows what kind of freaky connections witchers have to their daemons. It is probably even stronger than what people have. The rules are definitely more rigidly policed when it comes to witcher daemons. Misha just knows it. Because everything about witchers is more rigidly policed. Also … witcher daemons? Misha has never heard of this. And that is also weird, because he prides himself on having heard of near everything interesting. And prior to yesterday he would have bet his lute to argue that only humans, and only the ones directly descending of the early forest druids had them. 

“Hello,” Misha says again once the cat is sitting just a foot or so from his toes. Jensen blinks.

It really is an extraordinary creature. A beautiful contradiction. Its nose is petal pink, whiskers and fur around the equally pink mouth white as the edelweiss. The pink and the white makes Misha want to grab it and inspect its toes. He just knows they’re perfect pink toebeans. But the shape of its ears, its burly build, its large paws, the sharp, golden claws, the even sharper gem eyes and the twin points of its incisors make him look anything but gentle. This is a killer cat. Granted, still a cat, so probably not dangerous to things Misha’s general size, but … definitely not up for a toe inspection. Suddenly, Jensen the cat opens its mouth and … chitters? It’s a frustrated, aggressive half-sound. Mostly teeth, limited vocals. Maybe it can read minds and is deeply offended at Misha’s little toe fantasy.

Misha leans back. His “what?” is a bit on the helpless side. He looks first at Jaredt, then back at the cat.  
“Huh,” says Jaredt, standing and moving over to Roach.  
“What?”  
“He must think you’re prey,” Jaredt says, and Misha could swear he can hear a bit of laughter buried there, sandwiched between a layer of grit and another of steel: “can’t blame him.” Jensen the cat runs across what used to be the campsite in a flaming flash of gold and lands on Roach’s back.  
While Misha was planning to ask if the witcher speaks cat, he asks, instead: “you’re leaving?”  
It comes out pathetic.   
“Now you’re up we are,” the witcher says, fussing with the saddle straps.   
Jensen the cat licks its chops like it’s won an argument of epic proportions.   
“I am off to the Western side of Lake Vizima. It is two days journey. If you want to come, we need to get you a horse.”  
Misha is pretty sure this is the longest sequence of words that the witcher has ever directed at him. For balance, he responds with a baffled: “ugh.”  
“Did you not want adventures for your songs?” Jaredt asks and sounds definitively annoyed.  
“Yes!” Miha exclaims, “yes, songs!”  
He stands and stretches, his body cracks, pops and creaks. Beaten and sleeping in the forest weill do that. Not that he can complain in present company. He’s pretty sure that’s how Jaredt mostly sleeps. He tightens his bed roll and straps the lute to his back.   
“It’s gonna ride the horse?” he asks, pointing at the cat who is still sitting on Roach’s back, keeping a keen eye on Misha.  
“No,” Jaredt says with an air of exasperation: “I am going to ride the horse, he is going to sleep in the saddle bag. Because he is the laziest beast under the sun.” Jensen moves one of his ears. That’s it. A perfect statue of indifference, but the measured, pointed flick flack of an ear. It feels like an eye-roll more than any eye-roll Misha ever did see.  
Jaredt pulls on Roach’s reins and starts walking, muttering something Misha can’t quite catch. It seems they are walking. He said he will ride, but he is walking, because Misha is walking. They will walk to … wait ...  
“What’s on the Western side of Lake Vizima?” Misha asks.  
“A swamp.”  
The witcher’s back is broad, black leather stretching, the silver section of his hair glinting in tandem with the icy gleam of his two swords. One steel, for men, one silver, for monsters. Misha's heard the songs. A shiver, as silver as the witchers accessories, runs down his spine.   
“And what is in the swamp?” Misha asks.  
“A bloedzuiger.”  
Naturally … Misha thinks. Going on monster hunting adventures, while perfect song fodder, also includes … monsters. And a bloedzuiger sounds like a monster. And another thing he has not heard of before.   
“Are bloedzuigers, perchance, small … and, on the friendly side?”  
“No.”  
The witcher offers no further detail, and the daemon cat, after actually riding Roach for a few minutes, climbs into the saddle bag without sparing Misha another glance.

It is much later, after Jaredt has found a farm and made Misha part with his hard earned oren for a horse, after they have eaten a lunch of bread and ale, after they have ridden until nightfall, after they have stopped and set up camp, after the daemon cat has disappeared into the woods to hunt that Misha feels he might get away with asking more questions.  
“Do you speak cat? Daemon? Daemon cat?” he asks, poking the fire with a stick.  
“There is no such thing,” Jaredt says, but sounds slightly less like he wants to impart on Misha the wisdom of being quiet. And Misha intends to milk this crack in the mutant’s armor for all its worth. He never said he was a nice man. He wants information, he n e e d s information. It is important … for his craft. Yes. Songs. Epic ballads, shanties, they are all made of detail. Detail allows him to make the best choices regarding what to say, what to gloss over, what to discard and what to change to get a story people will remember. Ballads are not written to be believed, they’re written to move their audience.   
“So how did you know he wanted to eat me?”  
“I didn’t say he wanted to eat you.”  
“Fine, that he thought I was prey.”  
Something in the fire pops and hisses loudly. Misha jumps. Jaredt smirks.   
“That is the sound he makes at birds and squirrels,” Jaredt says, stretching out his long legs, rubbing hands down and back up truly massive thighs.   
Misha sighs.   
Great.   
Squirrels.   
Bushy tailed rats.  
He rubs a hand through his still blood-crusted hair. Looks down at his pants. They used to be such fine pants. They are dirty now. It makes him inexplicably sad. To be here, in his previously fine pants, with the witcher, who looks like a god, and his magic creature cat. Why does it even matter what a cat thought of him.  
“I thought daemons spoke human,” he says after a while.  
Jaredt looks up from where he was staring into the fire, eyes two pools of molten gold, a thousand degrees each. Raises an eyebrow.  
Misha shrugs. Two can play the non-verbal game.  
“Jensen doesn’t.”  
“But the two of you communicate?”  
The witcher looks back at the fire. Something in his jaw ticks. It’s not a happy expression. The smirk is gone and he’s rubbing an insistent thumb over an area on his chest. Like it hurts. Like he pulled a muscle. Like it’s an old scar, acting up with weather and memories.  
“He understands me,” Jaredt finally says, softer than before and long after Misha thought this line of conversation was done for, had been waiting for a moment to lay another question down. Jaredt’s thumb is still drawing circles on his chest.  
“But not you him,” Misha surmises. The oppressing wave of silence emanating from the witcher suggests he’s right. Suggests it to be a Thing. A worry. A regret. A pain.  
“Do all witchers get a daemon?” Misha asks, because he might be a bit of nice man after all. Rubbing salt in gaping wounds is not his goblet of wine.  
“No,” Jaredt says.  
“You are the only one?” Misha’s surprise colors the air, all attempts at playing it cool, using words sparingly, forgotten. This is unique. No wonder he had never heard of it before. He L O V E S unique stories. They make the best songs.  
“No, my mentor had one too,” Jaredt says, reaching for the leather flask, taking a long pull.   
Misha thinks. So all the witchers of Rivia have daemons? Just some? Those within a mentoring lineage? But people are born with daemons. And witchers are not born. They are made.  
“Since when have you had it?” he finally asks.   
A shadow passes over the witcher’s face. That too, is not a happy memory. Misha wonders if he has any.   
“Past four years,” says Jaredt, standing up. The line of questioning is definitely drawing to an end, but this, this is absurd. This is not … this is not how daemons work. This is impossible! That is not how daemons work.   
Misha seems to have exclaimed at least part of what he thought out loud, because the witcher grunts.   
“You are oddly well informed on daemon matters for a bard,” he says.   
And now it’s Misha’s turn to try to mask a memory. They look at each other over the orange glow of the fire. The witcher patient, but mildly curious. Misha stubborn and resentful.   
“I was educated,” Misha finally says, his register reaching Jaredt’s levels of gruffness.  
“What happened?” Jaredt smirks, one side of his mouth pulling up, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Seems that, against all odds, Jaredt might be a bit of a nice man as well. Or at least as averse to poking open wounds as Misha is.   
“I turned out a disappointment” Misha grins, reaching for the flask. Wine passes hands and the talk is done. They both settle into the warm non-silence of a nighttime forest.


	3. Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Misha, Jaredt and Jensen reach the swamp on the far side of lake Vizima and Jaredt leaves to kill the bloedzuiger. Misha stays behind, thinks he'll maybe write a song or something. But Jensen. Oh Jensen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello my loves. Next installment of the boys in Witcherland. Excitement awaits. Uh oh. Thanks for reading. Love you.

Misha is sitting in the shade of a large tree he doesn’t recognize. Its leaves are large, light green, but streaked with purple, and remind him of grabby hands. Five long tips, narrowing into nail-like sharp points. There are many plants here he hasn’t seen before. Twisting, climbing. Stems like rope, vines strangling each other, blooms seductively lush and fragrant. He’s been trying to write a song, but his mind keeps wandering. The clingy flora pulling him away from his task.

They’re at the very edge of the swamp. The air tastes different here, carries a sulfury, acerbic note that coats the back of his throat. The air is a warning, which Jaredt, of course, did not heed. No, he patted Roach, drank two vials of potion, one smelling faintly of what Misha thought was Moonflower, the other so strongly of Banewort there were no two ways about it. Banewort is poison. And not a little toxic either. No, it takes you from sweats to seeing things, to convulsions, to coma quick. But Jaredt shoved the empty vials back into his pouch and sighed. He rested both hands against the nearest tree, curling in on himself in what could only be pain, breathing heavy. One breath, two, three. Misha was half way up to run over, when the witcher stood up straight. His face was chalky white, pupils slowly dilating and changing color. Gone was the gold. Jaredt looked at Misha through pitch black devil eyes, smirked and headed off into the swamp. And now he’s been gone for hours. The sun is getting ready to set, and Misha doesn’t know how long a bloedzuiger hunt is meant to take. Will he be back soon? Will he be back tomorrow? Is he likely to die? Should Misha try to take the horses to water somewhere? If the air smells like this, will the water be potable?

So he sits, back against the thick trunk of the grabby-leafed tree, trying to coax a tune from his reluctant lute. The strings are sticky with stray longings and pointless nostalgia. Misha is lonely, but he doesn’t know why. He keeps conjuring up the beautiful faces of lovers past to see if he might be missing any of them, but no … no … nope, oh she was lovely, no ... , hm.. he had forgotten about him … no. Now and again, the gallery of conquests is interrupted with an involuntary glimpse back to this morning. 

Early, hours before sunup, Misha had half-woken into a soft slide of words. Jaredt was speaking, but his tone was so far removed from the usual gruffness that Misha had a hard time deciding whether he was still dreaming. Maybe he was. Suspended somewhere between wakefulness and slumber, in the halflife of steady breaths and slow thoughts, able to eavesdrop on a private conversation between a suddenly soft-spoken witcher and his mute cat. A witcher and his daemon. Although something is still niggling on Misha here. Granted, he is no expert on witcher daemons, and those might very well be different from normal daemons, but Jesen … he … daemons do not work like that. They speak. They are born with their humans. They are not supposed to be able to wander much further than half a dozen yards from their humans. Not without agonizing pain for both. And yes, Jaredt is probably used to agonizing pain, but Jensen the cat runs off into the woods with zero signs of distress. Comes back from his murder sprees licking blood off his snowy white chops. Something is … something is not right. 

“You shouldn’t worry,” Misha heard Jaredt whisper.  
Maybe he had lied when he told Misha he doesn’t speak cat. But why would he lie? Misha thought Jaredt had probably never lied about anything in his entire life. He bluntly stated things as they were, and was built to deal with the consequences.   
“People," Jardet went on, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve old women, when they axe a trapped fox or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the witcher riding through their villages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.”  
Jaredt’s tone, even in a whisper, settled, like a bad dream over Misha. Pushed heavy on his chest. It was simply too much to hear the big, powerful witcher confessing, calmly, with very little judgment for others, and an ocean of resignation for himself his bleak take on his place in this world. Misha had no choice but to crack his eyes. What he saw helped, but didn’t. Helped, but made it worse. It staved off the phantom pain he felt for Jaredt, the useless compassion bubbling in his gut, but added a strange new sensation to the mix. A sensation that hasn’t left Misha even now, hours later. Because Jaredt wasn’t alone in this. Someone was already there, consoling him. In the pale, waning darkness, under the canopy bleached of color, Jaredt was lying on his side. The broad expanse of him a wall between the campsite and the pre-dawn world, his shoulder a turret against the oyster sky. In the crook of his arm, with the pink nose against that spot Jaredt keeps rubbing, lay the cat. 

Misha’s lute lets out a strangled mewl and he sets it aside with a sigh. This just isn’t the day for a song.  
Misha must have dozed off, because the next moment his brain registers, his surroundings are ablaze with the setting sun, and Jensen the daemon cat is sitting, like a ginger-golden ball of fire, mere inches from him, watching his face with creepy determination.   
“Oh,” Misha says and covers a yawn with his hand: “hello. I thought that you...”  
Misha doesn’t finish. He doesn’t know what he thought. That Jensen went to hunt a bloedzuiger with Jaredt? Fierce as the cat may be, he doesn’t exactly come across like a monster killer. Not properly motivated.   
The eyes are hypnotizing. Misha fights the urge to close his. Fights the urge to reach out his hands and touch. Fights his entire self as it has seemingly entirely succumbed to unreasonable, incomprehensible urges. He has, in his entirety, turned into an unreasonable urge, because the magic cat is sitting too close to him.  
“Have you eaten?” Misha asks the cat instead.   
“Don’t feed it, it will come back,” an old scary song his mother used to sing rings between his ears. Misha shakes his head.  
The cat yawns, indifferent to Misha’s confusion.  
“Well, I haven’t,” Misha says and stands. Better, that’s better. Distance. “But I was too lazy to set any traps, and also somewhat scared of these plants, to be honest.” He has no idea why he’s being honest with the creature. “So I will make a fire for warmth, and I will eat some bread, an apple, and drink some of our wine. Maybe my lute will be a bit more cooperative in the dusk.”   
Jensen moves his ears and his whiskers. Not in that eye-roll of a flick, but just kind of … conversationally. Gods, Misha must really miss polite company to read so much into … whiskers.   
He goes in fearful concentric circles around the campsite, collecting branches for the fire, keeping a wary eye on the horses. He wasn’t kidding when he said he is afraid of the plants. He would easily get lost here. Be asphyxiated by a vine, kidnapped by swamp dwellers or eaten by a bloedzuiger, with no one coming to his aid.   
Jaredt would come back, and ask the cat where Misha was. And the cat would yawn and blink its poison eyes.

The dinner is a quiet affair, Jensen is still sitting close to Misha, but staring at the fire, transfixed and lost like humans in presence of flames. It seems that as long as the eyes are off Misha, he finds it easier to control himself around the cat’s magic. Yes, magic. He has decided the cat is magic and he will tell Jaredt the fist thing the witcher is back. This is no daemon cat. This is a magic cat. 

Misha has just fed more wood to the fire, sat back down and reached for his lute. He is lulled into an absent mind by the pleasant sensations of warmth, full belly and crackling flames, he reaches out his free hand, unthinking, mindless, and strokes Jensen’s small, soft, furry head. The creature turns his head, pushing his skull into Misha’s palm and looks at Misha with two huge absinthe eyes.   
Then everything happens.  
It all happens at the same time. 

Misha realizes what he’s done.   
It hits him in the chest like a horse kick. Time gels, gloops and bends, then speeds back up. Before he can pull his hand back, stick it in the fire, use it to cover his face, cut it off, anything - noises explode. On his right an enraged: “bard!” yelled out by Jaredt, who has emerged out of the darkness, covered in streaks of black, smeared with mud, bleeding and murderous. But Misha only has a second to notice the witcher. A fleeting, passing moment to realize he will now die by the mutant’s hand. Because on his left. On his left. On his left.   
The eyes are still green, the same green. Only huge, huge. Irises the size of Misha’s face, because the cat, the cat, he knew the cat was M A G I C, because the cat … the cat, with the eyes, the cat, because Jensen has twisted, turned and warped into a D R A G O N.   
The forest roars with noise. So much noise. Everyone is screaming. Everything is screaming. The earth roaring, trees shrill, skies deafening. Someone is pulling on Misha, and Jensen’s huge, razor sharp gold claws cut into earth like it is butter. The dragon stomps on the fire, and the fire doesn't go out, it goes in. Flame into dragon, matter to matter. Misha looks up and sees the black and gold scales glow, first on the dragon's chest, then expanding out and out. The scent of sulphur intensifies and mixes with a distinct odor of gunpowder.


	4. Toss a coin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We finally get some information on Jensen the daemon and how Jaredt got him. But of course, things change. Introducing a very beautiful, very naked man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I keep setting this story up. But now we're at where I've been wanting to be. Thanks for reading if you are. <3  
> xox

When a humble bard  
Graced a ride along  
With Jaredt of Rivia  
Along came this song

Misha’s voice is soft as he starts to sing. He’s sung it so many times now. He was right, when he promised Jaredt that letting him tag along will be good for his image. Was that really over a year ago, gods, has it been so long? But good for the witcher’s image it has been. They rarely yell “Butcher of Blaviken,” after him on the streets anymore. This song alone - people know it, people sing it, people ask for it. Good for his image and good for both his and Misha’s coin purses. Although people are still … people. What they don’t understand, they fear. Sometimes hate. And most of them fear Jaredt. It’s rational, while it is not. He would never harm a human without a really good reason. Even with good reason he’s reticent. Humans can deal with humans, he thinks. Witchers deal with monsters. But people don’t know that. All they know is that he is big, where they are small. Quiet where they are loud. He is still, where they flit and fidget. His eyes are gold and his hair is silver for the whole world to see what he is. There are precious few who see it as evidence of what was done to him. What was done to a child, who could withstand too much. Misha’s voice breaks a little as he starts in on the next stanza.

When the Dragon fought  
A silver tongued devil  
His army of elves  
At his hooves did they revel

Misha’s voice builds, he is singing over the diminishing din in the tavern. People are quieting down, as even those in the back corners recognize the song. Someone cheers. 

They came after me  
With masterful deceit  
Broke down my lute  
And they kicked in my teeth

Misha is layering drama into his voice now. He is good at what he does, OK? And drama sells. Although, drama always takes him back in time too. He remembers the cave, remembers Jaredt talking Filavandrel down through bloody lips. Speaking sense to monsters where others would run, fight or kill. Asking them to let Misha go, seeing as he is but a “useless human.” Speaking, as always, from a complete, heart-wrenching lack of investment in his own wellbeing, from a resignation that never stops depressing Misha. 

While the devil's horns  
Minced our tender meat  
And so cried the Witcher  
He can't be bleat

While people sometimes accuse Misha of making up his witcher songs - no one man … no one witcher could possibly have fought so many monsters and live to tell the tale … and Misha may have used … artistic license here and there - this part is 100% true. So true, in fact, that the lute his fingers are caressing dates back to the very occasion. He sings louder now, letting his voice fill the tavern, rise up, permeate the air, grow big, press against the walls and the ceiling.

Toss a coin to your Witcher  
Oh, valley of plenty  
Oh, valley of plenty, oh  
Toss a coin to your Witcher  
Oh, valley of plenty

And coin they toss. It rains in sporadic clanks at his feet and from the corner of his eye he sees the kid he made a deal with gather it up. Maybe he’ll buy himself a good time later. Or maybe he won’t. He used to say: “for me, a mattress without a lover isn’t a mattress at all, it’s incomplete happiness,” but it’s been a while. His mattresses, on the occasion he gets a mattress - Jaredt is stupidly committed to sleeping al fresco - tend to service just his lonesome need for rest. He refuses to quantify ‘the while’ on purpose, even though he knows. He knows. Sometimes, when he does get a mattress, he is visited by a green eyed, pointy eared, ginger savage, who creeps in like the mist, jumps up, soundless like death, only to unapologetically step on Misha, and sleep, rude and heavy, on his chest. So no, Misha is not going to tally up his chaste mattresses. Instead, he sings through another epic battle, then another, another rain of coins with the chorus. 

Toss a coin to your Witcher  
Oh, valley of plenty  
Oh, valley of plenty, oh  
Toss a coin to your Witcher  
Oh, valley of plenty

Maybe his good time will be a bottle of the good wine and a baked liver for Jensen. Inexplicably he really likes those. Maybe it’s a dragon thing. It doesn’t seem like cat thing. Or maybe it’s just a magic thing.   
Jensen.   
Who is not a normal daemon, and Misha knew it! That time at lake Vizima, when he turned into a dragon was … Misha lets his fingers dance on his elven lute strings. The skin on his palm still pulls when he plays, scars curbing the span of his fingers a little. They’re still good fingers, elegant and nimble, coaxing twinkling sounds into the grimy room. Pearls before swine. Anyway, yes. Lake Vizima was scary and traumatic … Jensens as a dragon, surely, but also the completely psychotic Jaredt, but they got over it. Misha’s burn scars are incomparable to those Jaredt has. But his heal faster. Plus, Jaredt was forced to fill in the gaping, glaring blanks in Misha’s story of what was going on with the witcher and the green eyed daemon.

He wiped out your pest  
Got kicked in his chest  
He's a friend of humanity  
So give him the rest

The story is strange, with an undercurrent of bleak, like most of Jaredt’s stories, but at least it makes sense … mostly? People closest to him are singing along now, not just with the chorus line, but the stanzas too, and the ample-bosomed redhead on his left sways, sways and raises her hands. She can not carry a tune to save her life. But she is loud and she is happy. Misha smiles at her. She smiles back. The reason Jensen doesn’t speak human, why he wasn’t born with Jaredt, why he changes form even though daemons are supposed to settle when their humans enter puberty, is that he is not Jaredt’s daemon at all. He was someone else’s. Someone apparently very dear to Jaredt’s mentor Vesimir. She succumbed to a curse right there in Vesimir’s keep, and Vesimir couldn’t help, because he was too busy helping Jaredt, who was, apparently, also dying at that very moment. His bleeding, spell-riddled body, more corpse than human, was dragged to the gates by Roach, ever faithful, loyal Roach. Jaredt didn’t give a lot of detail, but he did use a word, while pressing his palm to his chest, that has stayed with Misha. “Grafted.” They “grafted” Jensen onto Jaredt. It saved both their lives. They saved each other. But they are not each others. And Jaredt carries him - like a cross, like guilt, like second chance unearned, like secret hope at redemption - across the continent. From Skellige Isles to Farlands, from Nilfgaard to Kaedwen. Grafted. Grafted. A gentle process? Probably not. Misha pushes all of the emotion into his voice, brings the song to an end with conviction. 

That's my epic tale  
Our champion prevailed  
Defeated the villain  
Now pour him some ale

If Jardet was here all the patrons would be buying him ale. But Jaredt is off on an island, a days travel from here, dueling a Zerrikanian sorcerer. Not for oren, ducat or crown either. For honor and revenge. Because Azar Javed, the sorcerer responsible for the death of Jared’t mentor and many others at Kaer Morhen, is supposed to be there. He should be back already. He shouldn’t have gone in the first place, if you ask Misha, but he never ever does. Misha always tells him this, when he finally gets back, and Jaredt always tells him he worries like an old woman and should stop following the witcher around if it is too much for his gentle sensibilities. Misha tells him that he’s full of shit. But more poetically. Because he is, he knows he is, and he knows Misha is the only person on earth who both sees it and doesn’t mind. Also because Misha is a poet. They really have become friends. 

He’s holding wine, a baked liver and his lute. 

He’s holding wine, a baked liver, and his lute. 

He drops the liver. 

The man, the naked, gorgeous … no … the naked, blindingly beautiful man standing in his room follows the trajectory of the parcel with his eyes. Blinks. Slowly. Once. Looks back at Misha. He has cutting eyes, green like glass, green like gems. Strands of golden copper hair, a light dusting of golden freckles across the bridge of his nose, on his chest. He is lithe and strong and Misha is trying not to stare but his pubic hair is the same golden hue as his hair and. 

Misha takes a small step back, rests his back against the door. Slowly slides down. He sets his lute, gently, on the floor on the left and the wine on the right.   
The view from down here is even worse. Better?   
The man.   
The naked, breathtakingly beautiful man tilts his head a little. Looks at Misha. Looks at the parcel of baked liver, half way between the two of them, and something in his facial expression ticks. A minuscule muscle movement. A fleeting expression. A flick.

Misha holds his breath. Counts to ten. Counts back from ten. Stares at the liver, then at the man.  
He knows this flick. He knows his flick. The flick of a cat ear.


	5. Baked liver

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> so Jensen is a man now. And this is just too much for Misha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it feels somewhat perverse posting this rn, but beyond donating money, worrying, trying to avoid news, still doing news, there was a moment, after i took a walk, and smelled some lilacs, where writing this offered the perfect escape.   
> love you, be safe, be angry, but be safe.

“Hello,” Misha says from his place on the floor.   
“Hello Jensen?” he adds, reaching for the wine blindly, incapable of taking his eyes off the other man. Jensen tilts his head a little. It might be an acknowledgement. It might not be. Misha raises the wine to his lips, takes a sip, lets it sit in his mouth for a long moment, tingling on his tongue, dying his teeth. No clarity emerges. No veritas.  
He swallows.   
Jensen is still standing there and still looking at him.  
“Are you OK?” Misha asks.   
There’s a small movement, a subtle ripple of muscle, a shift in the shoulder, a tiny twist of the neck.   
Misha chooses to interpret this as a shrug. Wonders, briefly, whether it hurt. Whether it has hurt each time Jensen turned from cat to dragon to cat. Whether it hurt more to turn from cat to man. Then Jensen is moving and Misha stops wondering, goes back to holding his breath. Slow, almost languid steps across the floor. Predator smooth. If transforming into a human rattled him, it does not show in the way he moves. Before Misha can think anything else, let alone say it, Jensen is right in front of him, mere inches from Misha’s toes, a bizarre copy of the first time the two of them met. But instead of a ginger cat there is now a naked, beautiful, but so naked man, who … what is he doing, who … Jensen, completely ignoring his nudity, squats in front of Misha, rests his elbows on his knees.  
“Hello,” Misha says again. Looks up in an attempt to not stare at his junk. Ends up staring at Jensen’s mouth instead. Then in his eyes. Misha lets out a helpless groan, rubbing a hand over his face, reaching for the wine again.  
Jensen leans in. His nostrils twitch and his pupils visibly dilate.   
Everything suddenly smells like storm. Violent ozone, a hint of gunpowder. Hair stands up on Misha’s arms. The air is so thick with magic Misha could comb his fingers through it and come away with a fistful of fairydust. That, or he’s having an aneurysm.   
Misha takes another pull from the wine bottle.   
Contemplates offering it to Jensen, but before he makes up his mind, Jensen is moving again, one knee on the floor, the other, and he is kneeling over Misha’s outstretched legs, his face just inches from Misha’s. The eyes are incomprehensible. A kaleidoscope of greens. A narcotic mix of treasure and poison, thinly veiled in spring. Misha opens his mouth to say something, but produces no sound. The heavy scent of power and electricity coats his tongue. The inside of his mouth. The back of his throat. There’s a buzz in his ears and a numbness in his lips. He can’t feel his face. The gravity of an entire planet is pulling him in, pulling him towards Jensen, onto his skin, into his mouth.   
A press of lips, a grape tongue against a live wire.   
Lick the lightning.

His entire body roars to life. He is hard in his pants and out of his head. He’s never ever been so high and not for the lack of trying.

It’s not a kiss.   
It’s a near death experience.

The madness fissures slightly when Misha tastes something bloody, dark and earthy, remembers that this is someone who hasn’t said a word, maybe can’t, who has just turned from a cat-dragon-daemon into a human. Or back into human. Who is, in all likelihood, impaired, and should not, under any circumstances, be kissed or taken advantage of.   
He finds a smear of his brain. A thin condensation it left as it evaporated, on the insides of his skull. Uses it for motor control. Locates his hands, both gripping Jensen’s shoulders, fingertips pressing into soft, warm skin and supple muscle. Tries to unclench, but fails. Tries to speak, but fails. Uses all his might - all of it, every last ounce - to push Jensen back a little, move him from within Misha to the edges of his personhood.  
“Wait, wait,” he finally manages.  
Jensen’s face is too close for Misha to be able to discern expressions, but there’s a confused line between his brows. Misha tries to move him a bit further out of his space. Jensen goes where Misha puts him, does not resist, does not push back, but the magic, the magnetic pull, the insane particle physics at play here make this the hardest foot of distance Misha has ever accomplished in his entire life.   
He’s sweating and shaking.   
Jensen looks like he’s looked this entire time. Somewhere between beautifully blank and mildly curious. His lips are wet and red, and Misha closes his eyes, seeks salvation by averting them, looks down, because down is safe, and finds himself wrong. Because apparently Misha wasn’t the only one hard at the collision.  
“In the name of harpies and hellhounds, I can do this,” he tells himself. Holds his breath. Counts to ten.   
“I think I should find you some pants,” he finally says, strangled.   
Jensen’s face remains impassive at the idea, so Misha wriggles and sidesteps from between the door and Jensen’s body and turns his back to the other man. It helps. A little. He finds a pair of his pants he thinks might fit Jensen, and when he turns back, he finds Jensen contemplating the parcel of baked liver.   
“Are you hungry?” Misha asks.   
He doesn’t get an answer. Maybe Jensen won’t like liver as a human. That would be reasonable.  
“I could go get you some bread?” Misha offers.   
“Here, put these on and I will unwrap the liver, see what you think of it.” He’s reaching both of his arms out, one for the liver, the other to offer the pants. The parcel ends up in his hand, but the pants are ignored. Instead, Jensen walks across the room, as Misha stares, paralyzed, at the flex of his glutes, and sits on the window. Pulls a leg up and rests his chin on one knee. Looks out of the window, squinting a little in the sun’s last, lazy light. He looks completely serene, and for a moment, very much like a cat. 

Misha takes a step forward, then two steps back. The closer he is to Jensen the harder it is to not want to be closer still. It has to be magic, has to be, but he’s never heard of anything like that - it’s like there is something in his blood, in his marrow that sings to something in Jensen’s. So, he takes another small step back for good measure, sticks his hands in his pockets and floats a lame: “hey,” in an attempt to get attention.   
Jensen reluctantly shifts his eyes from the window.   
“Can you understand me?” Misha asks.   
Jensen says nothing, but Misha thinks he narrows his eyes.  
“But can you try and say something?” Misha pleads.   
Jensen looks bored. Does not say anything. Makes no attempt. And then he turns his head and is staring, again, intently, at the winding road from the tavern up to the town gates.   
“I’m gonna go get you some food OK? And some ale,” and some more wine for himself. If he is to survive this night, he needs to find a way to douse the magic singing him to shipwreck, and wine’s the only way he knows how. Well that and Fisstech, but they’re not in Temeria, and he doesn’t do that anymore.   
“Please don’t go anywhere until I get back, OK?”  
Jensen doesn’t acknowledge him.   
Misha prays and leaves. It is both easy and hard, walking away. Easy as the lead in his boots dissolves with each step, the further he gets from Jensen, the less his entire body aches to grab him, press him close, breathe him in, consume him. But the further he is, the stronger the steel vice of worry around his heart. What if he leaves? What if he disappears? What if he turns back into a cat? What if he turns into a dragon, roars through the roof and sets the tavern on fire?   
And where, in the name of all that is holy, is Jaredt?!  
He makes it back in record time, even though the night was in full swing downstairs and he was offered companionship, and the inn keeper kept smirking at him funny.   
He has two bottles of wine, a block of cheese, a nice half-loaf of bread and a pitcher of ale. A feast. The sigh of relief and the powerful clutch of need that his heart goes through as he opens the door and finds Jensen hasn’t moved from the window, sitting there in the weird sunless non-dark of summers in these lands, makes his knees wobble.   
“Hey,” he says again, to signal his presence, even though he knows Jensen knows. “I brought food.” He makes quick work of tearing up the bread and breaking apart the cheese. After a moment of contemplation, he cuts the liver into thin slices. His knife comes away smelling of rust and blood and his mouth fills with confused saliva at the memory of the kiss. Stuck half way between being sick and dying for more.   
“Here,” he says, placing the plate and the pitcher on the sill next to Jensen’s toes, “see if you want any of this.”  
Jensen looks at him, his eyes half see-through, like pieces of washed up glass in the white night. Misha sweats. His heart thuds in his ears, loud like a battle drum, egging him on, marching him into conquest of skin, tongue and teeth. He takes a step back. Then another, another. Another. He retrieves all of his wine bottles and sits on the bed. After a little rest to gather his composure he scoots against the head rest, sits there in the shadow and silence and drinks wine as fast as he can.   
Jensen’s skin looks golden in the anemic light of the night. The straight light of his nose and a moist patch on his lower lip are highlighted silver. Misha thinks he eats some of the liver and some of the cheese, but he can’t be sure. This will be an endless night. Misha can’t leave, but he’s sure he won’t sleep either. His wine is nearly gone. At some point, Jensen shifts, rests his back more fully against the wall, stretches his legs out. He doesn’t look uncomfortable per se, but put out by the mechanics of his human body.

Against all odds, Misha drifts off to sleep. He dreams of drowning, dreams of the open sea and waves crashing over him, pressing down on his body with the weight of the world. In his dream, he wakes, on that last unconscious gasp of life, the one that welcomes the ocean into the lungs, and finds himself back in the room above the tavern, with Jensen lying on top of him, perfectly aligned. Toes to toes. Calves to calves. Knees to knees. Thighs to thigs. Cock on cock. A heavy, alive, meat, blood and bone body pressing Misha into the bed and squeezing air out of his lungs. In his dream there’s a fistful of air between their faces. Misha’s in the deep, sleepy shadow, the dreamscape of blurry facelessness, Jensen’s in sharp silver relief of a finally emerged moon. In his dream, Jensen rubs a clumsy palm over Misha’s face, skin catching on his lip, wrapping around his neck, pressing a thumb into the thrumming pulse in his carotid. In his dream, Jensen moves his other arm, pushes up on the elbow and fucks his hips forward, rubbing his naked body against Misha’s pants. In his dream, Misha’s hands move, of their own volition to grab two handfuls of ass, pull Jensen down harder against him and his mouth surges up. In his dream, they are both fully hard and Misha is aching in his pants, dying for the feel of skin on skin. There are half words swallowed, needy noises smeared into sweaty skin. In his dream, he thinks, he catches Jensen sigh something that sounds like his name. Right when he pushes a hand down his pants without undoing them. Right when the dry pull of his palm is too much and not enough and Misha’s world implodes at the intersection orgasm and death by drowning.


	6. Leather pants

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morning after. There is no bliss, just impossible leather pants and an agitated Jensen rushing towards what can only be bad news.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi my darlings. I hope you have nice fic to read, or are writing as self care, as the world around us ... burns? rots? Roars into an abyss?  
> Love you for reading. Be safe XO

Misha doesn’t know what wakes him, just that he is suddenly no longer asleep, but blinking heavy lids against the pale almost-light of dawn. There’s a thickness in his mouth and a heaviness in his head, echoes of too much wine and not enough sleep. He’s really not ready to notice Jensen, still naked, still gorgeous, standing next to the bed, looking agitated. Although if someone asked Misha to explain how he knows Jensen’s upset, he’d draw a blank. He’s not saying anything. He’s not even doing much with his face. But his shoulders are drawn, his body is tense and his eyes are … agitated. And green. Mercy of all saints, so green.  
“Are you OK?” Misha asks, pointlessly, while pushing himself up on his elbows first, then sitting up and planting his feet on the floor. He’s still wearing his boots. And his pants. His pants that are weirdly half undone and. 

No.

Jensen makes an impatient little noise and walks over to the door, stands there, his silhouette growing more agitated by each passing second. But Misha is not looking at him. Misha can’t help him right now, because there is cum in his pants and he’s about to be sick. Some part of his brain tries to cling to the possibility that he had a Jensen and magic induced wet dream, but …

No.  
He breathes through his nose. Seep, slow breaths. Fights with nausea. Tries to remind himself that he didn’t do anything, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t grab, take. He didn’t take advantage. It’s not really working.

Jensen walks back over and pokes him in the shoulder with three demanding fingers. Misha tries to find his eyes, but he’s turned again, walked back to the door, standing there all pointy shoulders, angry rigid neck. Of course, he’s angry. He should be angry.  
“I’m sorry,” Misha says: “I’m really sorry Jensen.”  
He stands and takes a half step, makes a weird, aborted gesture between his stupid pants and Jensen. “I’m sorry.”  
There’s something going on, a barely there Morse code of micro-expressions and muscle ticks that reminds Misha of Jensen’s ear flicks when he was a cat. There’s confusion and then just … annoyance. Clearly Jensen is not angry at Misha, even though he should be, but he clearly, very very clearly, needs to go somewhere and couldn’t give a flying fuck about Misha and the cum in his pants.  
“You need to go?” Misha asks, but corrects himself almost immediately, because Jensen just looks more annoyed and more agitated: “We need to go?”  
Yes. That seems to be the case. Because the crease between Jensen’s brows smooths out and he turns entirely towards the door, shoulders an energized slope of go, go, go.  
Except. He’s still naked. Completely, absolutely naked.  
Noticing, that despite having comprehended the urgency of getting out of the door, Misha is still not moving, Jensen glances back over his shoulder and finally into Misha’s eyes. There’s that moment again, of reality shimmering and time wobbling once, twice, thrice in the same track, until Misha closes his eyes against the magic, and his building headache and rubs a hand over his face.  
“You’re naked,” he says: “we can’t go anywhere while you’re naked, they’ll throw us in jail for indecency.”  
Jensen, of course, says nothing. And does nothing helpful with his face either. He just stands by the door. It doesn’t seem like an explicit rejection of clothes, so Misha picks up the pants he tried to offer Jensen last night and walks them over. There is a drawn-out moment where the two of them stand, both contemplating the black leather pair that Misha has in his outstretched hand. It is dawning on Misha, with horrifying clarity, that he will have to help. Jensen looks miserable at the prospect, corners of his lips turned downward, a crease back between his eyebrows.  
“Uh,” Misha says: “I, do I… do you, how do you…”  
And this is ridiculous. What does he want from the poor man, who just turned human yesterday, after having spent an unidentified amount of time as a cat and/ or a dragon? To yank the pants from Misha’s hands and quickly figure it out on his own just because Misha’s too weak to fight the magnetic pull? Just because he’s worried he’d touch and .. touch and, never stop? Well, actually yes, that would lovely. But life is rarely lovely to Misha, so he sighs, breathes out, then in, then, for some reason, holding his breath, slowly reaches out and puts his hands on Jensen’s shoulders. Jensen does nothing. Encouraged by that and his own ability to withstand, at least momentarily, the soft, warm invitation of all that skin, Misha pulls and pushes, maneuvering Jensen over to sit on the bed.  
“There,” he says, more to himself than to Jensen, kneeling down with the pants, keeping his eyes, resolutely and heroically on Jensen’s bare toes. They’re nice toes. Oddly clean. He works, quickly and quietly, only breathing when absolutely necessary and gets both of Jensen’s feet into the pant legs and the pants up to his knees.  
Jensen doesn’t help. But he doesn’t do anything to make Misha’s task more difficult either. Misha looks up and Jensen’s head is turned, he’s looking out of the window, resolutely, with the kind of angry, hopeless misery that a child expecting a beating might cover their face with. His lips are tight, his jaw hints clenched teeth. Misha’s heart breaks for him, for his pride and his humiliation, for his non-verbal urgency that Misha keeps sidetracking with bullshit and pants. It helps. The heartbreak. It helps him get over his own confusion pinned between the push and pull, between conscience and collision, between magic and mania.  
“Stand up please,” Misha says, softly, unthinkingly, but to his surprise Jensen does. The shock of something akin to human communication having passed between them startles them both into looking back in each other’s eyes. The air shimmers, Misha can hear his own blood, the strong thud of his heart, the whoosh of it flowing through his arteries and veins. Hot.  
The air between them is hot like desert’s breath.  
Arid like the lick of flames. 

Jensen is looking down at him, over the broad, bare expanse of his own body, over his dick, over the bunched up material Misha’s fisting on his thighs.  
So Misha does what seemed to have worked before, he breathes out slow, in deep, closes his eyes and says: “I am so sorry,” twice, before pushing Jensen’s pants up as far as they go, standing, pulling them over the swell of his ass and quickly tucking his junk in. Because these are fucking leather pants. And someone has to do it.  
He pulls both of his hands off Jensen and takes three big steps back before he dears open his eyes. What he sees is … not helpful. In fact … they might have been better off on the streets with Jensen naked. Because right now he’s standing there like a dashing hero off of a cover of one of those novel’s pedigreed ladies hide in their drawers - bare chested, barefoot, in black leather pants that are slightly too tight around his thighs, and for his dick, with an unfastened fly. There’s a bit of that confused, blown out heat in his eyes, a fraction of what Misha saw last night, but still an appalled line to his lips. The pants? The operation of getting in to those pants? Will clearly not become a cherished memory. Jensen pulls at the drawstrings. Clearly won’t be able to tie them. So Misha steps back into his space and laces up his pants.  
“I’m sorry,” he says again. And then, for good measure, one more time: “I’m really sorry.”  
When he’s done, Jensen turns back to the door, his shoulders set, clearly done, absolutely done with this, ready to go. He’s been ready to go for so long.  
“I know, I know,” Misha says, “but you also have to wear a shirt.” He pulls one out of his bag, it's wrinkled, but big, with a collar opening half way down the middle. It will be easy to get Jensen into. Jensen yanks it out of his hands, and somehow manages to thrash it over his head, pull and poke with angry, uncoordinated jerks. Misha’s standing there, stunned and impressed. Because this is Jensen, Jensen the cat, Jensen the dragon, Jensen who doesn’t speak, but is so magical it rolls off him in waves, getting dressed. Well almost. He can’t do the sleeves. But still. Definite progress in terms of humanlike behavior.  
“Let me,” Misha says, holding the material away from Jensen’s body, directing his hands into correct holes. And then, they are done. Jensen looks even more like a princess’ wet dream: disheveled, gorgeous, in leather pants too tight and a white shirt too loose, not tucked in, not even tied at the collar. The golden freckled skin and a clavicle framed by the parting sails of bright white fabric. Misha swallows. Helplessly pats his own chest. “After you,” he finally says, opening the door.

People do stare. There aren’t many out yet, but the ones trying to shuffle through their early chores stop and stare at the tall, beautiful, somewhat dressed man, marching barefoot down the main road, towards the city gates, through them and out, followed by a rumpled bard, half-heartedly trying to keep up. It’s only when they’re past the gates that the morning air has cleared Misha up enough for him to realize that it can only be bad, it can only be bad news that makes Jensen rush like this.  
“Jensen,” he says, panting at the broad back in front of him: “Jensen where are we going? Did something happen?”  
Jensen does something, something that involves an arm flail and a shoulder jerk, half of a distressed sound.  
“Is it Jaredt?” Misha asks. Because what else would it be.  
He doesn’t need Jensen to mime through an answer, because he sees Roach, a riderless Roach, standing a couple of paces off the road, under a thick oak, tangled up in something, stuck or … no … holy heavens. Jensen’s running now and Misha jolts to keep up. One of Jaredt’s feet is still in the stirrup. He’s a large, unnaturally angled heap at Roach’s feet and … what is that smell.  
Misha gags.  
It’s the smell of burnt flesh.


End file.
